Category: tips and tricks

Few technologies survive more than five years — let alone 30 years — without significant change. In the last 10 years alone, our phones gained 20x the processing power and added capabilities from multitasking to visual messaging. We’re on the fifth standard of HTML and have evolved from FLV to MP4 as the dominant video streaming format on the web. As Andy Grove, one of Intel’s founders, said, “only the paranoid survive.” Technologies that do not change are resigned to obsolescence.

But the GIF, which celebrates its 30th birthday this summer, has endured as a format. While its technical aspects haven’t changed, GIFs have taken on three different lives — and usage of GIFs has never been higher than it is today.

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Adobe launched an update for its Lightroom photo management and editing apps on iOS and Android today. The iOS app for iPhone and iPad is getting a few new features, including support for Adobe’s selective brush, a new details tab and an interface update for the iPad version. That’s all pretty nice, but the biggest news here is that Adobe also completely redesigned the Android app from the ground up.

Adobe has long been an iOS-first shop and, while it now offers most of its apps on Android, too, it often felt as if the teams spent far more time polishing the iOS apps than the Android versions. Lightroom on Android was always a pretty competent mobile version of the desktop experience, but it never felt all that snappy and native.

“We wanted to provide the best Android experience possible so we redesigned Lightroom for Android from the ground up to be faster, more efficient, and, well, more Android-y,” Adobe says in today’s announcement. “Every screen has been redesigned with the goal of ensuring a natural, native Android experience while providing the highest quality, professional-grade mobile photo editing app ever.

”Sadly, new features like Selective Brush, which complements the currently available linear and radial gradients, and the Detail tab that gives you global control over sharpening and noise, are still coming to iOS first. Chances are we’ll have to wait a little bit longer to get these on Android.

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Editor’s Note: For Window’s users looking for an all-in-one digital asset manager, RAW photo editor with layers, ACDSee Ultimate 10 offers a solution. We invite you to check out a free trial of their application

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This is useful function to know about if you are wanting to move a folder (or even your entire photo Library) from one drive to another drive. For example, say you are running out of space on one drive and want to move photos to a new drive to free up space on the original drive.You could use Lightroom to move the folders via drag and drop within the Folders panel, but I don’t recommend doing that when a large amount of date is at stake. Using a move command is risky, because if anything goes wrong in the middle of the transfer you could lose data. I prefer a technique that involves copying the folders to the new drive outside of Lightroom, updating Lightroom to this change, and then later manually deleting the files from the original location (outside of Lightroom).

Copy the entire folder structure (as-is without changing the folder structure or photo file names) from the original drive to the new drive.

Open Lightroom.

Once the copy operation is complete, Expand the Folders panel and right-click (or however you trigger the contextual menu) the parent folder (of the folder structure you copied to the new drive) and choose Update Folder Location.

In the resulting dialog box that appears, navigate to and select that same folder in the new drive (the one you just copied over). Lightroom will update the catalog to point to the folder in the new location (and everything inside of that folder). If you have all your folders/photos in a single parent folder then you are done, but if there are additional folders at the same level as that top folder you just need to repeat steps 4 and 5 with those folders. Give it a test run to make sure everything is as it should be before removing the files from the original location.

Having a good backup in place before you do this is always a good idea. I use this function every time I migrate my photos to a new drive.

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Editor’s Note: For Window’s users looking for an all-in-one digital asset manager, RAW photo editor with layers, ACDSee Ultimate 10 offers a solution. We invite you to check out a free trial of their application In this Ultimate 10 tutorial, we’ll learn an easy way to create a popular selective coloring effect, converting a photo to black and white while leaving the main subject in full color.

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I was recently asked to create a Powerpoint template for someone and soon realised that with a few Photoshop techniques creating, editing and creating individual assets was a breeze. To keep the whole thing as flexible as I could I used Artboards, Smart Objects and Create Assets.

In this video I show you how to make three slide template, a main slide, a ‘blank slide’ and a slide for an image. Should you wish to create more then this technique allows you to do it in seconds. I hope you find it helpful!

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Most mirrorless cameras include wifi and the ability to work with a smartphone app, and most mirrorless photographers I talk to aren’t maximizing that connectivity and the included functions. The cameras themselves create the wifi, so you don’t need to connect to wifi wherever you are. I highly recommend you get used to using your app and let it help you work better. Here are some of the things I do regularly with my Lumix cameras and the Panasonic Image App.

Whether I’m sending pictures I just took of my kids to my wife or sharing pictures I just made with a client, I use this function daily. More and more, people want their pictures immediately and I find that sharing one during the shoot satiates the need for immediacy and gives me more time to finish the rest before sharing. It’s waaaaaay better than taking a phone picture of the back of the camera.

The trick with my camera/app combo is that only JPEGs can be transferred. Fortunately, your camera can create a JPEG from any RAW file you’ve shot, and also allows you to put some finishing touches on the photo. I often use my camera’s RAW processing tool to create a black and white JPEG of a photo and I share that with the client. This both trains my clients to like my black and whites, and it allows me to not be concerned with perfect color correction.

Instagram’s Direct feature just got more generally useful as a messaging option, with support added for external web links, and the ability to send photos and video in their original portrait or landscape aspect ratios without cropping. The first is really far more important than the second, mainly because it means users have less reason to go seeking other messaging options outside of Instagram.The links feature also includes inline previews for websites you paste the URL for, and the new photo and video treatment is much more in keeping with how people actually capture and view media on mobile these days. The updates are rolling out now to iOS users, and will arrive on Android soon. Links are supported on both platforms as of version 10.22.

Instagram Direct is a popular feature among the social network’s user base – there are 375 million monthly active users on Direct alone as of last count, a fresh number shared publicly in April. It’s a far cry from Facebook Messenger’s 1.2 billion monthly actives, but that’s still one of the biggest messaging apps in the world, and a product worth iterating on in order to help it capture even more market share.

This course is free until 7/1/17In this course—specifically designed for creatives—professor, contract attorney, indie film producer, and musician Seth Polansky explains how to protect yourself when presented with an industry contract. Media and entertainment companies spend billions of dollars every year on creative talent. Get an overview of the types of contracts that you can expect to see, the situations in which a particular type is used, and the specific red flags inherent in each. Seth discusses NDA, work-for-hire and contractor agreements, and proposals, quotes, and SOWs.

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Instagram is a constantly evolving tool, and one that has changed drastically over the past year. Now, more than ever, it’s important to follow some simple rules when posting to the social networking platform that can help you engage with not only your fans, but potential clients.

Tag Businesses and Locations

This might sound obvious, but oftentimes, it’s overlooked. Mention your clients or potential clients by tagging their Instagram accounts in images that feature them or their products.

On my recent trip to North Carolina, I stopped at several bars and restaurants, as I have a passion for shooting food and drink. Once I processed these images, and prepped them for Instagram, I made sure to mention the official Instagram account for the business. This made them not only aware of the image, but also made them look at my photograph. Doing so can create the potential for them looking at more of your photos, and potentially hiring you for an upcoming job.

Likewise, it’s important to tag locations. Even if you’re at your home, tag the neighborhood or district you live in. Doing so will make it so your photo is seen by people who are searching for location-specific images. And sometimes, these could get the attention of potential clients.

Use Applicable Hashtags

Just like tagging businesses and locations, be sure to use appropriate hashtags in the caption or comment of your image. This spreads your image across anyone looking for a specific type of image.

In my experience, it’s better to use hashtags that are more specific. When using a generalized hashtag with thousands (or millions) of photos tagged to it, your image is bound to get lost in the shuffle.

More is not always better here. Instagram allows you to use up to 30 hashtags in a post, but if you put hashtag after hashtag, you might annoy your followers, as it seems spammy. Instead, pick relevant hashtags that will draw an audience to your post

.Consider Creating a Series of ImagesSomething I’ve recently discovered is the advantage of creating a series of images. For me, I typically post three images over the course of one or two days. This helps my audience not only know what to expect, but it lets my account be more known for a certain type of photography, instead of a hodgepodge of images.Use a SchedulerIt’s helped me tremendously to use a schedule website like Buffer or Later.com. These tools allow you to upload your images, apply appropriate captions and hashtags, and schedule them for publication. When your image is set to be posted, you get an alert on your phone, and then your post is copied over to the Instagram app.Why do this instead of just post directly on your phone? It allows you to think more in-depth about what you’re posting, and come up with a plan.

Keep Up On Your Comments

When you get a comment from a follower on Instagram, be sure to thank them and reply back. Likewise, if you get a direct message (that little envelope in the upper right hand corner), answer it! Being responsive with your audience and engaging with them shows that you care about your photography.

That’s not to say you have to say “thank you” to all those spammy comments though. Instead, remove those and report the profile to Instagram.

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It’s Snapchat’s turn to copy Instagram while also staying one step ahead of its competitor. Today Snapchat launched a slew of new creative tools, several of which mimic Instagram’s features, including the option to remove the 10-second time limit on viewing photos that still disappear once closed. But Snapchat’s new option to let users erase real-world objects from their photos shows it’s still pioneering the visual communication format.As Snap adds more creative tools, it’s now organizing them all down the right side of the screen for easy access.

Here’s a breakdown of each of the new Snapchat creative features:

Limitless Snaps – Now you can select the infinity icon in the Snap photo timer so friends can look at the Snap as long as they want. It will still disappear once closed, though. This could be useful for sharing important information like an address via photo. Instagram already allows limitless viewing of ephemeral Stories and Direct Messages.

Looping Videos – You can tap the looping icon on the right side of the Snap composer to make your videos loop over and over, which is great for short videos or highlighting a particular moment. This gives Snap an animated GIF-style feature to compete with Instagram’s Boomerang.

Draw with Emoji – You can now use an emoji as a drawing brush. Select one from the creative tools on the right, and instead of a pen tip’s color, you’ll see a trail of that emoji as you draw. This takes the pain out of drawing with emojis by sticking them on one by one. Instagram actually tried something similar back in December with its Candy Cane holiday brush, but currently only offers more traditional marker, highlighter and neon brushes.

Magic Eraser – You can now select and remove objects from your Snaps, blurring their surrounding to cover the empty spot. Just select the Magic Eraser icon, paint over the object you want removed, and Snap will “Photoshop” it out automatically.Now the question is how long til Instagram offers a Magic Eraser and emoji brush of its own……

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By default, the latest version of Photoshop becomes the primary external editor for Lightroom. If you go to Preferences > External Editing, you will see it listed at the top. This is the editor, and file settings, that are called into play when you use the (Mac) CMD+E / (Win) Ctrl+E keyboard shortcut or use the Photo > Edit In > Edit in Photoshop menu command.

An external editor is any other pixel editor you may have installed on your machine. Aside from Photoshop, some of the most common are products from on1, Nik, Perfectly Clear, Topaz, Macphun, etc. For most of these products, when you install that software the connection between it and Lightroom are also installed. If you click the Preset drop-down menu under Additional External Editor you will see these listed.

If you select one of those presets, you will see the file settings used when creating the copy that is sent to the respective editor. For example, selecting the preset for Perfectly Clear Complete, I see that it is set to create a 16 bit ProPhoto RGB TIF file. If I wanted to change any of those settings, I could dial in my preferred choices, then click the Preset drop-down menu a second time and choose Update Preset from the bottom of the list. You can do this with any of the presets you have.

Alternatively, if you have an image editor that is not listed here and you’d like to be able to send a copy from Lightroom to that editor, you can create a custom preset. For example, I have Photoshop Elements installed, and I need to use that for some of the classes I teach. Here’s how to create a custom preset:

1. Click the Choose button, and navigate to the program you want to open (Applications folder on Mac, Program Files on Win) and select it

.2. Configure the file type settings as desired.

3. Click the Preset drop-down menu, and choose Save Current Settings as New Preset, and give it a name.

That’s it. You’ve now got a custom additional editor configured and ready to go. If there is an additional editor you use frequently, leave that preset selected in the Preset drop-down menu. That will make it available right under Photoshop on the Photo > Edit In menu, and when you go there you’ll see there is even a keyboard shortcut associated with the selected additional editor. Might just make your workflow one click faster.

This issue will feature artist, fashion model, and the Best in Show winner at the Kultivate Spring 17 Art Show, Sabine Mortenwold. Artist Kody Meyers is also featured, along with The Key’s Live Music Venue owner Liz Harley. Contributor Veruca Tammas discusses copyright and creative commons, Sandi Benelli has a photo essay on trees, Inara Pey has two features on the Butterfly Conservatory and the Edge Stylists present their May 2017 stylings, and Edge Stylist Tiszo Cioc presents a unique photo essay. Click on the cover to view the May 2017 issue:

Facebook finally has a better solution to freebooting — the common practice of stealing someone your video and uploading it to their Facebook Page to reap the engagement and audience growth. Today’s update to the Facebook Rights Manager tool that launched last year includes the new option to “claim ad earnings” on other people’s uploads of a video you own. This way if an infringing video includes a new mid-roll ad break Facebook is testing, the revenue will be sent to the content’s owner instead of the uploader who stole it.

And now instead of manually reviewing all pirated content instances, rights owners can set automated rules for whether infringing uploads should instantly be blocked, allowed but the viewing metrics shown to the owner, allowed with the owner claiming the ad earnings, or sent to manual review.

The “claim ad earnings” option puts Facebook Rights Manager closer to feature parity with the industry standard, YouTube’s Content ID. When Facebook launched Rights Manager last year, TechCrunch noted this feature was the one big thing it was lacking….

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Snapchat will no longer show that annoying white border around old photos that you share from Memories.Previously, if you shared a photo from Memories that was more than 24 hours old it would have a white border around the image.While Snapchat’s goal was to remind viewers that this older content wasn’t truly ephemeral, the ugly border ended up annoying users who didn’t want their snaps altered, sometimes to the point where they would decide not to share the old content at all.

Disincentivizing users from sharing content is a problem for any social platform, and especially one for Snapchat which is now trying to keep up with the rapid growth of Instagram Stories.So this change should help increase the amount of old Memories that users decide to send to friends and post to their story, since they no longer have to worry about it looking ugly or uncool. While shared Memories will still have a small note at the top saying how old the image is, it’s much less intrusive than the border.

Notably, this doesn’t change how Snapchat handles photos shared from the camera roll.LEFT: How photos shared from the camera roll appear. RIGHT: How old Memories will now appear.T

he app will still treat Memories (images captured then saved from within Snapchat’s app) differently from camera roll images (images taken on a phone’s native camera app). So any image uploaded from the camera roll will still have a white border around the image.

So Snapchat users can only share old content without a border if they originally capture this content in Snapchat’s app.The change is essentially forcing users to choose which they value more — the ability to share old borderless images in Snapchat and have a good-looking story, or the ability to use their iPhone’s native camera app (which can capture higher-quality photos and videos with more features because it’s not relying on a public API).

It’s also another signal that Snap truly does see itself as a camera company, and wants to be the default app people open when they go to capture a photo or video.This differs from Instagram’s approach to old photos in Stories: The app lets you post any photo less than 24 hours old to your story without any ugly border or notation, regardless of where it was captured. This move has been well-received by users as it’s essentially the best of both worlds — you can use a native camera app while still sharing old content. And the 24-hour limit doesn’t really matter on Instagram Stories, because if you like an old image that much you’ll probably just post it as a regular old Instagram.

How to use OBS Studio to Record or Live Stream Second LifeFiled under TECHNOLOGY, TUTORIALS, VIDEOS5I continue to get numerous questions about this so I thought I would do a detailed tutorial with a video so you guys can also get into Second Life vlogging and live streaming.Watch my video on YouTube for all the information: https://youtu.be/NLciu-Dt7Q4

Now, Motion Graphics Artists Can Set Up Templates with Elements That Can Be Easily Modified by Premiere Editors

Adobe updated its Creative Suite applications today with a workflow built around the new Essential Graphics panel in After Effects and Premiere Pro.

In After Effects, the Essential Graphics panel allows users to put the most important elements of a composition in one place, where they will be easier to update. Using a new Motion Graphics Template feature, the AE user can hand that composition off to a Premiere editor (via exporting it as a file or saving it to a shared Creative Cloud library), after specifying adjustment properties that should be available in Premiere such as text, color and opacity. That allows the editor to easily make adjustments to the composition without sending it back to AE for revisions.After Effects CC Essential Graphics panel

After opening the Essential Graphics panel in Premiere, the editor can easily change the color or background image used in a template, or can use controls to increment episode numbers, change graphics styles, or adjust the screen position and scale of elements. To help users get up to speed, 70 sample motion graphics templates will be installed with the new version of Creative Suite, Adobe Director of Video Product Management Bill Roberts said.The goal is to make it easier for Premiere users who have never dabbled in After Effects to adjust AE-style compositions without learning a whole new program. In order for the workflow to function, After Effects must be installed on the editor’s computer, but does not have to be licensed. “Premiere users without After Effects will be just fine using this,” said Adobe Senior Product Manager for Video Editing Patrick Palmer during a press briefing introducing the new workflow…..

Apple’s Live Photos are fun — they’ve definitely captured a few unexpected magical moments for me that standard stills would’ve missed. But for the most part, they live on your phone and stay within the confines of your apps. Seeing them floating around the web, especially on a desktop browser, has always been something of a rarity.

Tumblr kicked down that wall a bit last year by adding Live Photos to its web version and releasing a tool to let others do the same. When it came to an official Apple-approved method, however, there was nothing to be found.

That quietly changed this morning, with Apple updating its developer portal with a new tool they’re calling LivePhotosKit. It’s a JavaScript API built specifically to bring Live Photo playback support to your sites.

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